This book sets the foundations of Newton's alchemy in their historical context in Restoration England. It is shown that alchemical modes of thought were quite strong in many of those who provided the dynamism for the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and that these modes of thought had important relationships with general movements for reform in the same period.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications held in September 2007. Papers are organized into topical sections covering XML, data and information, datamining and data warehouses, database applications, WWW, bioinformatics, process automation and workflow, knowledge management and expert systems, database theory, query processing, and privacy and security.